6. The Google Alphabet

Can you guess the top Google search result for the letters of the
alphabet? For example, when you search for “a”, the top Google result
is Apple Computer Inc (naturally, the top result changes over time).
Simply note down the first company, organization, software, person or
product you can think of below: A: Apple Computer Inc
B: ________________________
C: ________________________
D: ________________________
E: ________________________
F: ________________________
G: ________________________
H: ________________________
I: ________________________
J: ________________________
K: ________________________
L: ________________________
M: ________________________
N: ________________________
O: ________________________
P: ________________________
Q: ________________________
R: ________________________
S: ________________________
T: ________________________
U: ________________________
V: ________________________
X: ________________________
Y: ________________________
Z: ________________________

Solution
Apple Computer Inc, B’Tselem, C-SPAN, D-Link, E! Online, F-Secure, Gmail, H-Net, iTools,
Jennifer Lopez, K Desktop Environment, Council of Europe portal, Texas A&M University,
SBC Knowledge Network Explorer, O’Reilly Media, PFLAG.org, Q4music.com, The R Project
for Statistical Computing, McDonald’s, T-Mobile, whatUseek Web Search, V-Day, President
George W. Bush, X.Org, Yahoo! Messenger, Z Communications. (–results often change.)

5. Google Q&A

Google Q&A is a fun answer feature built directly into the
Google.com web search. It answers certain questions right above the
search result, so there’s no need for you to visit a web page – the
answers themselves are extracted from web pages.
You haven’t seen this before? Give it a try by entering the following:
Albert Einstein birthday
Above the web page results there will now be a box reading:
Albert Einstein – Date of Birth: 14 March 1879

This works with a whole lot of search queries. You can even enter Who
is Clark Kent ... and have Google reveal to you “Clark Kent is the
civilian secret identity of the fictional character Superman.” All of the
following yield direct Questions & Answers results (note the answers
are not always correct!):
Population of Germany
President of USA
President of France
Birthday of George Bush
Birthday of Albert Einstein
What is the birthday of Albert Einstein?
Who was President of the USA in 1996?
When did Isaac Asimov die?
Isaac Asimov date of birth
Isaac Asimov birthday
What is the birthplace of Bono?
Bono birth place
Who is Prime Minister of England?
Where is the Eiffel tower
Where is the Statue of Liberty
When was Star Wars released?
Who is the Queen of the United Kingdom?
Who wrote the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

4. The Disappearing Google Logo, a Magic Trick

Here’s a magic trick to surprise your friends with. What they will see is
this: you are at the Google homepage, and you casually ask someone to
watch the Google logo. Then, you move two of your fingers to
completely cover the “o”s in the Google logo. When you remove your
fingers, to much surprise, the letters “o” will be missing from the logo.
Now you ask your friend to move her fingers over the missing “o”s.
After your friend removes the fingers, the logo will be complete again!
The trick here? It’s not really the Google homepage you and your
friend are looking at – it’s a fake page
darkartsmedia.com/Google.html
.
And when you click on the page, the letters of the logo will disappear
after five seconds. Clicking again will make them reappear after five
more seconds. So when you move your fingers to cover the Google
logo, simply click anywhere on the page, and wait a bit before you
remove your fingers… and when your friend covers the letters, you
click again. (A third click, by the way, will change the page to an actual
Google homepage so you can perform searches to “prove” the page is
real.)

3. Douglas Adams and the Google Calculator

The Google calculator is included in Google.com’s normal web search.
So instead of entering words you want to find in web pages, you can
simply enter math queries like the following:
10 + 7 * 3 – 12
The Google result will then display the solution: “10 + (7 * 3) - 12 =
19.” That’s already a little more fun than using a normal calculator (and
incredibly helpful too, at times), but there’s much more to it. Let’s start
with an Easter Egg – a hidden function within a program that makes it
do something unexpected and interesting – and enter the following:
answer to life, the universe and everything
Entering this will result in the Google calculator showing you the
answer “42.” This is a reference to a mythical number from Douglas
Adams’ sci-fi opera “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” I won’t
spoil its meaning here, but instead suggest you simply read this great
book (or, watch the movie). This isn’t the only connection between
Google and Douglas Adams, by the way. Completely coincidentally, the
word “Googleplex” – the name the Google employees gave their
California headquarters – appeared in the Hitchhiker’s Guide:
The calculator fun doesn’t stop there. The following are just some
more examples of what’s possible, and often these different queries
can be combined to larger formulas:
seconds in a year (result: 31,556,926 seconds)
15 USD in EUR (12.74 Euro)
120 pounds * 2000 feet in Calories (77.77 kilocalories)
furlongs per fortnight (0.000166309524 m / s)
speed of light in knots (582,749,918 knots)

2. Browsing Images of a Site

If you want to see all images of a particular website, you can use the “site:” operator on Google Images images.google.com – you may know this operator from Google’s web search. For example, enter site:cnn.com into the Google Images search box to see all images shown on CNN’s website. Click on an image in the result list and you’re taken to the respective page containing the image. This approach is fun if you want to visually explore a site, and you are not interested in any particular content on that site. However, you can still combine the site search with an additional keyword. A search for site:cnn.com obama would therefore show CNN’s images of President Barack Obama, or images related to him. Want to try this out on a site a little more fun than CNN? I suggest you enter the following for thousands of riveting photo illusions: site:worth1000.com

1. Egogoogling: Rono Is…

Have you ever searched for your own name on Google, curious what

the world has to say about you? Almost everyone of us did, one time

or another. In fact, you should – maybe others search for you all the

same, and you want to know what they will find.

The act of searching for yourself is also known as “egogoogling.”

Here’s a variant of it which can be a fun game. Enter your first name

followed by the word “is” into Google, and put the search in quotes.

For example, if your name is rono, the search would look like this:

“rono is”

Now in the search result snippets, you will learn a lot of things about

you that you didn’t even know! For the name “rono,” we get the

following:

Rono is an amazing person to work with!

Rono is an ethical man and is refusing to cooperate

Rono is a very attractive young boy (with a girlfriend) who for

some reason is always late.

Rono is a top Florida residential real estate agent.

Rono is a top producer specializing in the ski resort town of

Breckenridge, as well as the surrounding area.

Not only can you apply this approach to find out more about yourself

(or just have a good laugh, actually, as the results are likely to be about

another person), you can also use this to find out about celebrities. To

do so, enter the full celebrity name followed by the word “is” into

Google, and put it in quotes again:

“arnold schwarzenegger is”

For action movie star Arnie, we get these results:

Arnold Schwarzenegger is a very talented man who would

make an excellent governor.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is falling into a similar spiral.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is looking out for voters’ best

interests.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is a man more familiar with the red

carpets of a movie premiere than a white collar business seminar.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is terrifying as the “killer cyborg” who

“looks like Death rendered in steel.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger is The Terminator (T-800).

Arnold Schwarzenegger is quickly discovering that life in

politics doesn’t always produce the happy endings so common in

many of his Hollywood blockbusters.

Note that you can use “stars in,” “was born in” and similar glue words

instead of “is” to find out almost anything about a celebrity. You can

even expand the idea to include things, not people… try searching for

“Nikon cameras are” and similar queries.

Ways to Have Fun With Google

Introduction

Google-not just the fun stuff, but news, discussion, interviews, tutorials, and everything beyond a relation to search engines. When I think of Google, first and foremost I think of its role to discover knowledge, people, and people’s thoughts. Search engines are truly one of the first emergents of a global brain, and in good tradition of Gutenberg’s inventions in the technology of printing, of the invention of the internet, and later the invention of the World Wide Web. All those bring us closer together by speeding up the rhythm in which we communicate. So there we have it, for the first time in history: search, the key to instant knowledge. And what do we do with it? Silly things.OK, not exclusively. But silliness is a part of it. People googlewhack, googlebomb, or egogoogle. People create parodies of Google. They create search engine contests. Magic tricks, riddles and art based on Google. They have a lot of fun with Google, and get together to play games on top of Google services. Even Google Inc themselves send out April Fool’s jokes every year, and celebration logos many times a year. Oh, humanity! But behind many of the playful creations surrounding that giant Google toy, there are serious lessons to be learned. Of the ways to have fun with Google presented here, some ways indeed teach us something; about life,Google, and how to become a better searcher. And the rest of the ways? Well, seriously, they’re really just there to have fun. And I hope you enjoy!